Introduction

Welcome to Collage, a high-performance C++ library for developing object-oriented distributed applications. This release introduces the official 1.0 API of the former Equalizer network library.

Collage 1.0 is a stable release of over eight years of development and decades of experience into a high-performance and mature C++ library. It is intended for all C++ developers creating distributed applications with high-level abstractions. Collage 1.0 can be retrieved by downloading the source code or one of the precompiled packages.

Features

Collage provides different levels of abstraction to facilitate the development distributed applications:

Network Connections: stream-oriented point-to-point and reliable multicast connections for TCP/IP, SDP, InfiniBand RDMA, UDT, events, named and anonymous pipes, memory buffers and reliable multicast over UDP.
Peer-to-Peer Messaging: Endian-safe node-to-node message communication with thread-aware message dispatch.
Synchronization: Distributed barriers and synchronous messaging.
Object data distribution: high-performance, object-oriented, versioned data distribution for C++ objects based on delta serialization.

New in this release

Collage 1.0 contains the following features, enhancements, bug fixes and documentation changes over the Equalizer 1.4 release:

New Features

Endian-safe messaging
RDMA connection supported on Windows

Enhancements

Improved co::ObjectMap API and implementation

Optimizations

co::WorkerThread uses bulk message retrieval from co::CommandQueue

Tools

New coNodePerf application to benchmark node-to-node messaging performance

Documentation

The following documentation has been added or substantially improved since the last release:

Full documentation for the public Collage API
Expanded Collage content in the Equalizer Programming and User Guide

Bug Fixes

Collage 1.0.1 includes various bugfixes over the 1.0 release:

40: Commit of buffered objects with multiple chunks broken

Collage 1.0 includes various bugfixes over the Equalizer 1.4 release, including the following:

25: mapObject races with commit
22: Crash during concurrent object deregister and map
13: Global argument parsing broken
3: Snappy compressor does not work on PPC

Known Bugs

The following bugs were known at release time. Please file a Bug Report if you find any other issue with this release.

16: RSP Interface not bound on Linux
15: RDMAConnection not endian-safe
14: coNetperf server occasionally crashes on client disconnect
2: Multiple dispatcher inheritance not working with xlC

About

Collage is a cross-platform library, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. Collage uses CMake and Buildyard to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested for version 1.0:

Linux: Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, RHEL 6.3 (Makefile, i386, x64)
Windows: 7 (Visual Studio 2008, i386, x64)
Mac OS X: 10.8 (Makefile, XCode, i386, x64)

The Equalizer Programming and User Guide covers the basics of Collage programming. The API documentation can be found on github.

As with any open source project, the available source code, in particular the shipped tools provide a reference for developing or porting applications.

Technical questions can be posted to the eq-dev Mailing List, or directly to info@.nosp@m.equa.nosp@m.lizer.nosp@m.grap.nosp@m.hics..nosp@m.com.

Commercial support, custom software development and porting services are available from Eyescale. Please contact info@eyescale.ch for further information.

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